DIGIDECK Wins Innovation in Sponsorship Award
DIGIDECK has been named the 2026 Innovation in Sponsorship winner in the Sponsorship Marketing Association’s Sponsorship Excellence Awards, announced at the Sponsorship Mastery Summit in Nashville on September 30th.
The Sponsorship Excellence Awards recognize the people and organizations setting the standard across the sponsorship industry. Fellow winners include Momentum as Agency of the Year, CMA Fest as Property of the Year, Athletic Brewing Company as Sponsor of the Year, and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment with Mastercard for the Social Impact Award. As SMA CEO and Founder Paula Beadle put it, “These awards exist to shine a light on the people and organizations proving what sponsorship can do at its best.”
Why DIGIDECK Won
Sponsorship business is most often sold and communicated through a pitch deck. For most of the industry’s history that deck was a static file: built once, exported to PDF, emailed, and rarely heard from again. DIGIDECK started with a simple question about whether the pitch could work harder than that. Today more than 600 organizations, including every major league, present sponsorship through interactive, personalized decks that show how a partner engaged with them.
The pitch became a conversation instead of an attachment.
That work most recently extended to DIGI, the AI inside the platform and the first governed AI layer built for sponsorship. AI can draft a sponsorship pitch in seconds, but the outputs are unpredictable and often go off-brand when using free public AI tools. DIGI knows your business including your pricing rate cards, strategy, branding, and more ensuring every deck created remains on-brand and on-point.
Sellers describe the opportunity, DIGI assembles a first draft, the team refines it, and once the deck is sent the platform reports how the partner engaged with it.
That is the approach SMA recognized: AI brought into sponsorship in a way that respects how sponsorship is actually sold, where speed matters but trust matters more. The goal was never AI for its own sake. It was giving sellers more time for the relationships that close deals, and a clearer picture of what partners respond to.
Thank You
An award for innovation belongs as much to the people who adopt it as to the people who build it. Thank you to the properties, teams, leagues, agencies, and destinations that entrust DIGIDECK with their most important conversations. Their feedback, their patience with new ideas, and their willingness to try a different way of pitching are what shaped the platform and what shaped DIGI.
Thank you as well to the Sponsorship Marketing Association for the recognition, and to Paula Beadle and the SMA team for creating a stage where the sponsorship industry celebrates its best work.
Sponsorship is changing, and it is a privilege to be part of the transformation!